So, I was going to purchase a new CPU this holiday and thought I'd support AMD. As the performance is comparable to a 3570k and it costs $25 less. I don't really care about efficiency and thought it would be a fun change after all these years.

Welp as it turns out the 8350 is selling for the same exact price as the 3570k, not just on Newegg, but also at all other retailers. While I'm willing to pay for a worse off chip at a lower price point, they're selling them for the same price. Perhaps this is just to get early adopters of the chip? It would be different if the chips were retailing at $195, but they're selling them at higher price points. It just makes me think the lower MSRP at launch was to get in better with price/performance charts.

Adding to this, Newegg has a $20 gift card on the 3570k, so it costs less then the 8350.

It also really depends what you're going to be doing with the chip as to whether it's comparable to a 3570K or not. If you do lots of integer-heavy multi-threaded stuff, yeah, it can equal or surpass a 3570K. If you do a lot of gaming, FP-heavy or IPC-dependent stuff, the 3570k pulls ahead by a decent amount. Add in the heat/efficiency things, plus a basically identical price and meh. Just get a 3570K

Buy Intel bro, it's not like it's going to impact AMD that much until 21 december.....

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At the same time i5-3570K is a better processor than both of those for not much $.

IMO, the best way to support AMD is to buy their GPUs because they offer superior performance, overclocking and game bundles to Nvidia's GTX600 offerings. This way, you don't really need to compromise much and still end up supporting AMD if that's your intention. With latest drivers, and modern games, HD7950 V2 / 7970 / 7970 Ghz cards are cleaning up GTX660Ti / GTX670/680 lineup.

I wanted the 8350 for OCing... Mainly to make sure it's not binned differently from the 8320s.

Weird, Amazon.com has no sellers for less then ~$220.

I was going to buy AMD for something different and because I don't want Intel to be the only game in town in the future. Mainly I consider the 3570k a better choice solely because it has a GPU on board. I use a discrete video card, but Virtu is something I'm interested in. I know the 3570k accels in some areas and the 8350 in others, but it's all pretty closely matched when it comes down to it.

Some interesting things I discovered while shopping for a 8350. There aren't nearly as many motherboard choices for AMD compared to Intel. AMD chipset offerings are sorta dated. Although that means there is information readily available on motherboards that have been on the market for quite some time.

Pildriver seems to have issues with the stock heatsinks. Specifically that the processor works close to 60c and when turbo boost engages, it takes it over 61c that a lot of motherboards have selected as the place to start thermal throttling, which causes the processor to throttle itself at the same time as turbo boost is kicking in. So you get weird oscillating frequency spikes and consequently performance.

I have a AMD GPU and have bought ATI since the 8500. They've always been comparable in speed and they're usually priced appropriately.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to support AMD- they're not going to support you .

True. But we'll all regret it when they're gone, and Intel's prices rise 300%. And yeah, I know... a few enthusiasts buying their CPUs isn't going to change that, unfortunately.

The current prices on the 8350 reflect the implicit "early adopters tax". I went for a 8320 for my new Linux desktop build.

Bensam123 wrote:

Some interesting things I discovered while shopping for a 8350. There aren't nearly as many motherboard choices for AMD compared to Intel. AMD chipset offerings are sorta dated. Although that means there is information readily available on motherboards that have been on the market for quite some time.

Well, AMD is less popular now. So the motherboard vendors aren't as eager to push 20 different variations on a theme to market, since this would mean a lot of expense to try and grab a larger share of a shrinking market. I'm still fairly happy with Asus' offerings, and not only is information readily available, driver support in recent Linux distros is quite good as well since the platform is evolving more slowly.

Bensam123 wrote:

Pildriver seems to have issues with the stock heatsinks. Specifically that the processor works close to 60c and when turbo boost engages, it takes it over 61c that a lot of motherboards have selected as the place to start thermal throttling, which causes the processor to throttle itself at the same time as turbo boost is kicking in. So you get weird oscillating frequency spikes and consequently performance.

Are you sure the oscillations aren't due to "normal" power management activities?

Regardless, I've always found stock heatsinks to be a bit loud (not just Bulldozer/Piledriver). So for several years now my SOP has been to slap an inexpensive Coolermaster heatpipe cooler in all of my builds from the get-go, even when buying retail CPUs. Keeps the temps out of the "danger zone" without a lot of noise.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

I'm not sure why anyone would want to support AMD- they're not going to support you .

True. But we'll all regret it when they're gone, and Intel's prices rise 300%. And yeah, I know... a few enthusiasts buying their CPUs isn't going to change that, unfortunately.

I don't know if Intel sees any benefit from doing that at this point. Doing so does two bad things: slows down purchases, first, and second, may drive migration to the cloud and ARM-based devices.

I think it is more likely that Intel will slow down the pace of development, which has already happened to some extent. At this point, Intel's business is geared to the selling of CPUs at the current volume. It would take some unimaginable restructuring of it's pricing and supply chain for Intel to switch to lower production levels and higher prices all while maintaining the same profits. It would take some hits on operating costs or else downsizing costs.

I think what I'm trying to say is that it's my belief that Intel is somewhat locked in to maintaining its production volumes and that doing anything to cause sales to drop is going to hurt Intel pretty bad unless it is down very patiently over an extended period of time. And all the while the ARM + cloud platform keeps getting more viable as a serious computing platform, thus the threat of a whole new type of competition is something for Intel to worry about.

I don't know if Intel sees any benefit from doing that at this point. Doing so does two bad things: slows down purchases, first, and second, may drive migration to the cloud and ARM-based devices.

The trouble is, Intel's low-end stuff is still priced like a goddamn golden faucet, or restricts all the good stuff to OEM's. I can't build a $500 PC with a quad-core Core i5, but Gateway can. And I sure as hell can't build a PC with a dual-core, Ivy Bridge Pentium that has AES-NI instructions, but HP can. I sure would like to, but I can't -- because Intel deactivates all that crap and sells generic **** to enthusiasts. If I want some of those nice features, I pay up for a CPU that has... way more performance than is necessary, and way higher cost than my customers are willing to go. ARM sure as hell isn't an option, so I guess I'm forced to go with AMD -- which I'm happy to do, mind you, I want to see Steamroller happen.

But Intel is definitely resting on their laurels, and PC enthusiasts are taking the hit.

Don't get me started on Intel's product segmentation strategies. I understand that it makes a certain amount of business sense, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

This x 1000, its damn near crooked these days, yet certain OEMs get all sorts of breaks and marketing incentives kickbacks.

Also the lack of ECC going mainstream rests squarely on their shoulders, not dram fabs that run on razor margins on a good day. With the amount of data flying around these days even on a regular desktop, who knows how much undocumented bit rot is really out there.

Also the lack of ECC going mainstream rests squarely on their shoulders, not dram fabs that run on razor margins on a good day. With the amount of data flying around these days even on a regular desktop, who knows how much undocumented bit rot is really out there.

Preaching to the choir, dude.

It's one of the reasons I still tend to prefer AMD, in spite of their current shortcomings. For some of us, raw performance isn't the most heavily weighted factor in the purchase decision equation.

Edit: No frikkin' way I'm paying $220 for an 8350 though... at least, not unless it's someone else's money!

Edit 2: I also agree that DRAM cost is no longer a significant factor. With DRAM prices at historical lows (again), that extra chip per bank is a non-issue unless the DRAM vendor decides to charge an "enterprise grade" price premium "just because". Kingston's unbuffered ECC DIMMs are quite reasonably priced these days. You'll still pay a non-trivial premium for buffered/registered DIMMs, but in that case you're firmly into enterprise hardware territory anyway.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

I could see instances outside of servers where I'd want a 16-core Interrlagos or Abu-Dhabi instead of an i7. In fact I think I'd even want those over a Xeon, when messing around with lots of virtual machines (which is normal behaviour for testing environments).

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I could see instances outside of servers where I'd want a 16-core Interrlagos or Abu-Dhabi instead of an i7. In fact I think I'd even want those over a Xeon, when messing around with lots of virtual machines (which is normal behaviour for testing environments).

The G34's still aren't bad for an 8-core multi-socket-capable solution.

I've gotta say... an FX on a motherboard that supports 32GB RAM and ECC is a kick-butt budget server/virtualization platform. Asus' recent AM3+ boards have IOMMU (hardware I/O virtualization) support, even on mainstream models like the M5A97 R2.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

I agree, AMD really should've merged it's server sockets with it's desktop sockets and let enthusiasts have at server processors on desktop motherboards. I think it would've bred an entirely new and interesting segment of overclocking. Obviously a lot of 16 core chips can't make it to the same frequency as their desktop equivalent, but some of those server chips looked really promising. I've seen this being asked for by more then just me too.

And while it can be argued that servers are a good source of income, most big companies are staying away from AMD right now so it really wouldn't hurt anyone.

I also agree about AMD owning the low end. Really as soon as you step into Trinity territory AMD tears it up. Their Trinity offerings are extremely enticing to anyone doesn't plan on purchasing a discrete video card and even the vasual gamer. With some Black Friday sales you can put together a FM1 system for $100, motherboard/processor, all you have to do is buy the memory.

This whole $220 fiasco was really killer for me. If they were priced at $195 normally and Black Friday brought them down to $160 I would've bought one in a heartbeat, but they didn't. You could get a 8150 For $160, but seriously **** that noise (they just want to move old inventory). Instead I ended up buying a 3570k for $190 and a ASrock Motherboard for $100 (from $135). Perhaps on the next upgrade cycle, either way AMD isn't winning any favors and this is the time of the year when people are making big purchases. The weird part about all of this, was there really weren't any big sales on AMD stuff... It was all Intel, except for 8120s and 8350s and a handful of FM1s, all old stock.

As far as the frequency oscillations go, it's not normal. It's under 100% workloads with the processor falling to its lowest multiplier then going up to a turbo-multiplier. There were reports of it doting the nets when I was doing some background checks on overclockability of the 8350. It also appears that on average a 8350 can hit higher clocks then either the 3570k and the 3770k due to Intels new 22nm/3Dtrans fubard architecture in IB.

The 2500k and the 2600k are turning into enthusiast parts as well. Intel still sells them, but at a premium.

The trouble is, Intel's low-end stuff is still priced like a goddamn golden faucet, or restricts all the good stuff to OEM's.

This doesn't make sense. Intel's low end stuff is priced at low end prices. You can get an i3 for around $100. You can get Pentiums for less.

I can't build a $500 PC with a quad-core Core i5,

Why stop at asking for a $500 i5 build? Why not ask for a $500 i7 or Xeon build? You're arbitrarily asking for Intel to override it's own product segmentation, and since you are making arbitrary requests you may as well go big or go home. If you're an OEM buying tens of thousands of CPUs at once, I bet Intel might give you better than retail pricing so you can build 10,000 i5 computers for $500 a pop.

AES-NI instructions, nice features

I totally agree with that, but that certainly is besides the point I was making. My only point was to say that it seems to me that even if AMD dies it will be difficult for Intel to stop offering CPUs at the budget/mainstream price points.

AMD dying will definitely not be good for end users, but that's obvious. I'm not arguing anything else. I'm just wondering if Intel is in a position to do what some people think it will do: stop selling CPUs at lower price points. I'm certainly not an Intel apologist. I've had only AMD CPUs in my personal builds since 1999. I'd really like to have AMD in my future builds, but I'm not going to if AMD doesn't put a product on the market that I find compelling. I'll happily pay $200 for an i5 - just like I happily paid $200 for my Phenom II X4 955 (which happens to still be going strong).

that's Intel charging more to enthusiasts because they are enthusiasts because they can.

No, it's called economy of scale. An enthusiast is only going to buy a handful of CPUs per generation (if Intel are lucky) - HP, Dell or Apple are going to buy tens of thousands. The big-box manufacturers get preferential treatment, it's not Intel specifically screwing over enthusiasts - it's a case of simple economics.

I'm sure AMD didn't charge full "consumer price" for each of the 18,688 CPUs inside the Titan supercomputer either. AND Oak Ridge got them before the consumer even had a chance to get their hands on them!

well hang on for half a second, HP offers up an i5 tower for $500 but "we" can't build it... that was his point, it's proven to be a tenable goal that is restricted to OEM's only, it's Intel that is restricting cpu access to OEM's through special deals that aren't available to enthusiasts in the open market.

The CPU deals are restricted to those who buy large numbers of CPUs. That's quite justifiable. Buy in bulk and get a better deal. If I were an OEM, I'd be pretty pissed if I couldn't score a better price for CPUs than any single schmo buying a single CPU from Newegg.

ARM isn't for desktop.... literally and Intel is the Cloud through it's server business making a faster transition to Cloud notably more desirable for Intel.... especially if gaming becomes cloud popular because those demands are also beyond ARM's abilities.

None of that speaks to the point I was making so I won't bother with it.

Actually I just specced a machine from two sites, and managed to come up cheaper than Dell's current UK offers despite having to buy a copy of Windows 7 etc. Try speccing one from newegg with identical specs to an HP/Dell machine and I think you'll be surprised how close you can get.

Buy in bulk and get a better deal. If I were an OEM, I'd be pretty pissed if I couldn't score a better price for CPUs than any single schmo buying a single CPU from Newegg.

I agree 100% but then how good of a deal is it and to be clear Intel doesn't care about joe schmo, they don't deal with joe schmo, Intel deals with Newegg who buys cpu's in bulk ...... that said regardless it's likely decent given it allows Dell to make a profit on top of covering all of the logistical costs associated with their business model.

historically the overall costs favored DIY's despite the bulk purchase benefits that Dell and HP were getting which left the OEM's to gain their advantage off the strength of the bundled software, support and brand... so what's changed in the past 2 years to cause the shift.

obviously the answer is 2 things, the collapse of AMD and rapid decline of the desktop market which is causing Intel and vendors to slowly adjust pricing to maintain revenues.... which means they are charging more per part to enthusiasts because they know they can.

ARM isn't for desktop.... literally and Intel is the Cloud through it's server business making a faster transition to Cloud notably more desirable for Intel.... especially if gaming becomes cloud popular because those demands are also beyond ARM's abilities.

None of that speaks to the point I was making so I won't bother with it.

either all of it does or your point is so off base that it's worthless.

I'll leave it for you to decide with the hopes that you try to explain how ARM cpu's will be able to overcome desktop CPU performance advantages when currently ARM is comparable to half an Intel atom...... especially when it's been you in particular that have claimed repeatedly in a very great many threads about how important single threaded performance is and also how important it is that desktop computers at the minimum have at least a Core i5's processor lest buyers be making a mistake.

XBit further speculates that even if it were true there would still remain an socketed line for enthusiasts. Albeit that's a rumor on top of an already existing rumor. The veracity of this whole thing is roughly equivalent to the claim that aliens are amongst us and preparing to conquer us.

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend. Come inside! Come inside!"

Right so it's pretty close assuming you don't spend money on AV when Microsoft offer a perfectly functional free one. That's what I was saying. Remember they'll get cheaper *everything* because they're buying in bulk - right down to cases, PSUs, keyboards and mice. The CPU is only one tiny part of the whole equation. They probably save about 25% by buying in bulk, then add about 10-15% back on for profit - the desktop PC market hasn't been staggeringly profitable for quite a while now (unless you're Apple).

Last edited by Mentawl on Sat Nov 24, 2012 6:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Remember they'll get cheaper *everything* because they're buying in bulk - right down to cases, PSUs, keyboards and mice. The CPU is only one tiny part of the whole equation.

Yep.

the desktop PC market hasn't been staggering profitable for quite a while now (unless you're Apple).

Yep, even while they get bulk purchase discounts. That's because of the race-to-the-bottom mentality of most PC makers and most PC buyers. Then you've got people like Boxx, and the Dell and HP workstation lines.

But to return to the original topic of this thread, it's interesting that Intel is getting attacked for high prices and yet the OP was complaining that the prices on AMDs parts are too close (read: too high or else Intel's are too low) for him to justify buying something slower, hotter, and more energy consuming. Does anyone else see the irony?????

That led to JBI wondering how high Intel would jack prices if AMD exits the stage, which led to me saying I don't think Intel has a lot of room to do so given Intel's need to sustain revenues and unit sales, which led to other people strangely complaining that they can't build a system as cheaply as an OEM can! Ridonculous webs we weave! Conveniently (why not go further off topic at this point), this ties into another one of the arguments I have with the cheapskate DIYers that want TR system guides to include builds at ever lower price points - DON'T DO IT TR! Once you get to a certain price point, it's far better to go buy an OEM system and skip building your own.

Intel does have better processors, before Intel Core 2 processors released I remembered how Intel fans said that Intel XE 965 3.73GHZ was better than AMD 64 FX62 2.8GHZ processor in performance benchmarks, if you looked at benchmarks you know that is not true. If you want to use AMD then do so. I might be bias because the system I have now is a Amd system. Intel process are better value and have better performance, that being said AMD has good processors too. I looked at the gaming benchmarks and see games using only really only two cores, If it used more than two cores then Intel four cores process would handle win over there two core processors . AMD AMD FX-8350 future gaming performance would look better. The AMD Piledriver Cpu disappoint me, there quad core processor should have the performance of their eight core processor. And for the high performance end area they could have dual Cpu setup. Intel does have great advantage over Amd, there Manufacture process is almost always step above AMD.